Karen Blixen and Hans Christian Andersen

Bernhard Glienke

(summary for pages 420-33)

Traces of Hans Christian Andersen's reception by Karen Blixen
are to be expected. Her work is marked by its complex and explicit
intertextuality directed towards pre-realistic and anti-realistic world
literature. Andersen, a romantic storyteller of Danish extraction and
worldwide recognition, can be assumed to have aroused her interest. In
an international context their relationship, if established, would not
rank like any other but as an empirical confirmation of a coupling
regularly suggested in treatments of Danish literature outside Denmark
where these two tend to represent the highest constellation.

Indeed, as far as open, individual literary references (titles
and names, allusions, quotations) of varying length and on different
levels are concerned, Andersen occupies an important position in
Blixen's work. Without providing figures, as they depend on the
system of quantification chosen, I think I am right in putting him in
fourth place, far behind Shakespeare and just behind Homer and Goethe,
but ahead of people like Snorri Sturluson, Heine, and Kierkegaard.
Contrary to any scholarly approach, she refers to him only where, in
her interpretation, specific elements of his writing serve specific
purposes in specific passages of hers. Thus light is shed in both
directions. Further it is characteristic of her creativity that on the
level of whole stories it is counterstories ("modhistorier")
she likes to tell. In the following I shall restrict myself to the
three most important "applications" of Andersen.

Blixen shows by far the greatest interest - evident in a
quarter of all references - in "The Emperor's New
Clothes". It is true that this tale has proved one of the most
useful always and everywhere, especially as a political parable - in
fact, this poetic commentary on absolutist government in its last,
defensive decades was a rare and brave act by the author. But Blixen
makes use of it for one of her existential concerns: the priority of
imagination ("fantasiprincip" versus
"realitetsprincip"), the aristocratic "Wille zur
Maske", the will to wear a mask and to play a role as ways of
accepting God's idea about every human being.

Many of Blixen's stories deal with the conflicts that this
will or lack of will leads to; in this case it is The Deluge of
Norderney, where two of the stories inserted oppose both each
other and the fairy tale mentioned ("The Story of Timon of
Athens" and "Calypso's Story"). The latter story is
a female, perhaps even a feminist, version of Andersen's.

Another counterstory is to be found in the volume where one
would look for it, in Vinter-Eventyr, her book of
intertextuality on the level of work to work. Like
"Heloïse", "Alkmene" and
"Sorg-Agre", (only) its Danish title signals the Andersen
connection: "De standhaftige Slaveejere" / "The
Steadfast Tin Soldier". Here the uniquely detailed and grotesque
description of a female body derives from Andersen's dancer. The
fulfilment in an unfulfilled love relationship between non-equals is
the common theme. But whereas Andersen praises the male servant, Blixen
exemplifies the dialectics of the aristocratic code of
interdependence.

While in Africa, Blixen longed for the past in the sense of her
native Guldalder culture - to which Andersen belonged - as
well as for a future of imaginative and fairy-tale literature in his
spirit. In her poetological statements both within and outside her
fiction he suited her as a mainstay when she attacked realism and its
genre, the novel. For example she calls upon him in her only piece of
literary criticism, the grim and witty essay on H. C. Branner's
Rytteren of 1949; this much-debated novel about the
contemporary middle class search for meaning is both made fun of and
taken seriously as its own mythical deconstruction, expressed by
comparison with Andersen's "The Travelling Companion" and
other friends. His, she says, is the kind of fiction young Danish
writers ought to imitate.

Finally looking beyond these two superstars, but sticking to
the military metaphors suggested by the tin soldier, one might conclude
that this application of Andersen is part of classic modernist
ammunition against realistic normality, since Blixen is most at home in
the symbolist school. It is a prominent battle in the long war of
mythical, synthetic writing against mimetic, analytic concepts.